Assumptions of brightness constancy and spatial smoothness underlie most optical flow estimation methods. In contrast to standard heuristic formulations, we learn a statistical model of both brightness constancy error and the spatial properties of optical flow using image sequences with associated ground truth flow fields. The result is a complete probabilistic model of optical flow. Specifically, the ground truth enables us to model how the assumption of brightness constancy is violated in naturalistic sequences, resulting in a probabilistic model of "brightness inconstancy". We also generalize previous high-order constancy assumptions, such as gradient constancy, by modeling the constancy of responses to various linear filters in a high-order random field framework. These filters are free variables that can be learned from training data. Additionally we study the spatial structure of the optical flow and how motion boundaries are related to image intensity boundaries. Spatial smoothness is modeled using a Steerable Random Field, where spatial derivatives of the optical flow are steered by the image brightness structure. These models provide a statistical motivation for previous methods and enable the learning of all parameters from training data. All proposed models are quantitatively compared on the Middlebury flow dataset.

This paper presents design and development of a six legged
robot with a total of 12 degrees of freedom, two in each
limb and then an implementation of 'obstacle and undulated
terrain-based' probabilistic roadmap method for motion
planning of this hexaped which is able to negotiate large
undulations as obstacles. The novelty in this implementation
is that, it doesnt require the complete view of the robot's
configuration space at any given time during the traversal. It generates a map of the area that is in visibility range and finds the best suitable point in that field of view to make it as the next node of the algorithm. A particular category of undulations which are small enough are automatically 'run-over' as a part of the terrain and not considered as obstacles.
The traversal between the nodes is optimized by taking the
shortest path and the most optimum gait at that instance
which the hexaped can assume. This is again a novel
approach to have a real time gait changing technique to
optimize the travel time. The hexaped limb can swing in the
robot's X-Y plane and the lower link of the limb can move
in robot's Z plane by an implementation of a four-bar
mechanism. A GUI based server 'Yellow Ladybird'
eventually which is the name of the hexaped, is made for
real time monitoring and communicating to it the final
destination co-ordinates.

We propose a method to estimate the detailed 3D shape of a person from images of that person wearing clothing. The approach exploits a model of human body shapes that is learned from a database of over 2000 range scans. We show that the parameters of this shape model can be recovered independently of body pose. We further propose a generalization of the visual hull to account for the fact that observed silhouettes of clothed people do not provide a tight bound on the true 3D shape. With clothed subjects, different poses provide different constraints on the possible underlying 3D body shape. We consequently combine constraints across pose to more accurately estimate 3D body shape in the presence of occluding clothing. Finally we use the recovered 3D shape to estimate the gender of subjects and then employ gender-specific body models to refine our shape estimates. Results on a novel database of thousands of images of clothed and "naked" subjects, as well as sequences from the HumanEva dataset, suggest the method may be accurate enough for biometric shape analysis in video.

Existing approaches to nonrigid structure from motion assume that the instantaneous 3D shape of a deforming object is a linear combination of basis shapes, which have to be estimated anew for each video sequence. In contrast, we propose that the evolving 3D structure be described by a linear combination of basis trajectories. The principal advantage of this approach is that we do not need to estimate any basis vectors during computation. We show that generic bases over trajectories, such as the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) basis, can be used to compactly describe most real motions. This results in a significant reduction in unknowns, and corresponding stability in estimation. We report empirical performance, quantitatively using motion capture data, and qualitatively on several video sequences exhibiting nonrigid motions including piece-wise rigid motion, partially nonrigid motion (such as a facial expression), and highly nonrigid motion
(such as a person dancing).

We propose a hierarchical process for inferring the 3D pose of a person from monocular images. First we infer a learned view-based 2D body model from a single image using non-parametric belief propagation. This approach integrates information from bottom-up body-part proposal processes and deals with self-occlusion to compute distributions over limb poses. Then, we exploit a learned Mixture of Experts model to infer a distribution of 3D poses conditioned on 2D poses. This approach is more general than recent work on inferring 3D pose directly from silhouettes since the 2D body model provides a richer representation that includes the 2D joint angles and the poses of limbs that may be unobserved in the silhouette. We demonstrate the method in a laboratory setting where we evaluate the accuracy of the 3D poses against ground truth data. We also estimate 3D body pose in a monocular image sequence. The resulting 3D estimates are sufficiently accurate to serve as proposals for the Bayesian inference of 3D human motion over time

In scenes containing specular objects, the image motion observed by a moving camera may be an intermixed combination of optical flow resulting from diffuse reflectance (diffuse flow) and specular reflection (specular flow). Here, with few assumptions, we formalize the notion of specular flow, show how it relates to the 3D structure of the world, and develop an algorithm for estimating scene structure from 2D image motion. Unlike previous work on isolated specular highlights we use two image frames and estimate the semi-dense flow arising from the specular reflections of textured scenes. We parametrically model the image motion of a quadratic surface patch viewed from a moving camera. The flow is modeled as a probabilistic mixture of diffuse and specular components and the 3D shape is recovered using an Expectation-Maximization algorithm. Rather than treating specular reflections as noise to be removed or ignored, we show that the specular flow provides additional constraints on scene geometry that improve estimation of 3D structure when compared with reconstruction from diffuse flow alone. We demonstrate this for a set of synthetic and real sequences of mixed specular-diffuse objects.

The detection and tracking of three-dimensional human body models has progressed rapidly but successful approaches typically rely on accurate foreground silhouettes obtained using background segmentation. There are many practical applications where such information is imprecise. Here we develop a new image likelihood function based on the visual appearance of the subject being tracked. We propose a robust, adaptive, appearance model based on the Wandering-Stable-Lost framework extended to the case of articulated body parts. The method models appearance using a mixture model that includes an adaptive template, frame-to-frame matching and an outlier process. We employ an annealed particle filtering algorithm for inference and take advantage of the 3D body model to predict self occlusion and improve pose estimation accuracy. Quantitative tracking results are presented for a walking sequence with a 180 degree turn, captured with four synchronized and calibrated cameras and containing significant appearance changes and self-occlusion in each view.

We extend the work of Black and Yacoob on the tracking and recognition of human facial expressions using parameterized models of optical flow to deal with the articulated motion of human limbs. We define a "cardboard person model" in which a person's limbs are represented by a set of connected planar patches. The parameterized image motion of these patches is constrained to enforce articulated motion and is solved for directly using a robust estimation technique. The recovered motion parameters provide a rich and concise description of the activity that can be used for recognition. We propose a method for performing view-based recognition of human activities from the optical flow parameters that extends previous methods to cope with the cyclical nature of human motion. We illustrate the method with examples of tracking human legs over long image sequences.

We consider the estimation of local greylevel image structure in terms of a layered representation. This type of representation has recently been successfully used to segment various objects from clutter using either optical ow or stereo disparity information. We argue that the same type of representation is useful for greylevel data in that it allows for the estimation of properties for each of several different components without prior segmentation. Our emphasis in this paper is on the process used to extract such a layered representation from a given image In particular we consider a variant of the EM algorithm for the estimation of the layered model and consider a
novel technique for choosing the number of layers to use. We briefly consider the use of a simple version of this approach for image segmentation and suggest two potential applications to the ARK project

Most approaches for estimating optical flow assume that, within a finite image region, only a single motion is present. This single motion assumption is violated in common situations involving transparency, depth discontinuities, independently moving objects, shadows, and specular reflections. To robustly estimate optical flow, the single motion assumption must be relaxed. This work describes a framework based on robust estimation that addresses violations of the brightness constancy and spatial smoothness assumptions caused by multiple motions. We show how the robust estimation framework can be applied to standard formulations of the optical flow problem thus reducing their sensitivity to violations of their underlying assumptions. The approach has been applied to three standard techniques for recovering optical flow: area-based regression, correlation, and regularization with motion discontinuities. This work focuses on the recovery of multiple parametric motion models within a region as well as the recovery of piecewise-smooth flow fields and provides examples with natural and synthetic image sequences.

This paper presents a novel approach to incrementally estimating visual motion over a sequence of images. We start by formulating constraints on image motion to account for the possibility of multiple motions. This is achieved by exploiting the notions of weak continuity and robust statistics in the formulation of the minimization problem. The resulting objective function is non-convex. Traditional stochastic relaxation techniques for minimizing such functions prove inappropriate for the task. We present a highly parallel incremental stochastic minimization algorithm which has a number of advantages over previous approaches. The incremental nature of the scheme makes it truly dynamic and permits the detection of occlusion and disocclusion boundaries.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems